Enjoyable except for tricky poetry, fiction questions

Exam reaction: Junior Cert English "Enjoyable" and "challenging" were just some of the adjectives used to describe the first exam of this year's Junior Certificate, English Paper 1.

Honours-level students started with the Reading section, which featured an Irish Times article by Hugh Linehan on the subject of cinema pests, and many enjoyed the dry humour and topical theme.

The Personal Writing section offered plenty of choice from the imaginative teaser line, "Finally the smoke cleared and I could see ..." to a topical Olympics diary. Teacher and skoool.ie contributor Mr Philip Campion was delighted with the honours paper, which gave scope to students of all abilities, he said.

He particularly welcomed the Media Studies section, which once again pushed out the boundaries of the Junior Certificate syllabus.

Students were asked to analyse a Toblerone advert or to describe the role of a newspaper editor and write an editorial column.

The advert, which used the theme of the movie Jaws to profile the "Great White" Toblerone, was not well received in every quarter. TUI representative Mr Tommy Glynn believed many Junior Cert students were unfamiliar with the 1975 Spielberg film and missed the main point of the advertisement as a result.

The Ordinary Level paper went down very well with teens across the country, who enjoyed essay topics such as "Nobody Understands Me" and "The Most Important People in My Life".

The tone of the reading section, which featured a light-hearted history of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, left many students smiling.

The poetry section threw some 21st-century students, who were baffled by an archaic reference to "bob-a-jobbing".

Overall, however, the paper was well received and many students, according to Mr Campion, thought it was a great start to the Junior Cert.

The afternoon paper proved challenging for higher-level students, with some abstract questions to test the stronger student. After a relatively easy morning honours students were made to work for higher grades.

Some students were unhappy with the technical flavour of the questions on Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Luckily, the questions on Shakespeare's The Tempest were generally regarded as fair.

Students of Skerries Community were generally content, according to Mr Campion, but many were unhappy with what were described as tricky questions in the poetry section.

Mr Glynn expressed difficulties with questions in the fiction section, which he described as "off the wall".

"Students were asked to discuss the impact of stories which explore the 'outer edges of the unknown'.

"This is very advanced material for 14-year-olds to handle," he commented.